SCOTT COUNTY, Tenn. — Doctors Coffey Internal Medicine and Family Care has announced it is closing its clinic for good.
The clinic made the announcement on Facebook Wednesday, saying they will stop taking patients on July 30. Dr. Bruce Coffey is planning to work part time with the Mountain Peoples Health Clinic in Oneida, according to the announcement.
The clinic recently moved to a new location after a fire destroyed one of its buildings in late January. The clinic also claimed COVID-19 was part of the reason behind the closure.
The Coffey clinic is part of a Drug Enforcement Agency drug trafficking investigation.
In June 2018, the DEA and Tennessee Bureau of Investigation raided the clinic, run by Dr. Bruce Coffey, as well as a pharmacy next door. The DEA said that the clinic handed out prescriptions for around 4.9 million narcotic pills, such as Hydrocodone.
The DEA cites property records alleging Coffey co-owned Mark's Family Pharmacy next door to his former medical clinic.
The pharmacy, also included in the federal affidavit, filled 43 percent of oxycodone prescribed by Bruce Coffey alone.
"Mark's Family Pharmacy's oxycodone distribution in 2016 was almost three times the state average and four times the national average," the DEA affidavit alleged.
In 2017, the DEA said the pharmacy's orders of oxycodone increased.
A former patient interviewed as part of the DEA investigation said Bruce Coffey told her she "should fill her prescriptions at Mark's Family Pharmacy."
"You would have to be very, very foolish not to think there will be significant criminal charges in the very near future," defense attorney T. Scott Jones said in January.
Jones reviewed the sworn affidavit on behalf of 10News. He is not otherwise involved in the case.
"I mean it’s obvious when you read the affidavits that it wasn’t just something assembled overnight and it’s not just merely baseless allegations," he said. "We’re tired of pill mill-type operations addicting members of our country and the Feds likewise are taking a heavy-handed examination of this and they’re not going to tolerate it."